racter, and without
character you cannot build a free and a happy nation. A nation
enormous in power, what do you know of the way in which your power is
wielded in many a far-off land? How much do you know about your vast
Indian Empire? How many of your voters going to the poll can give an
intelligent answer to any question affecting that 300,000,000 of human
beings whom you hold in your hand, and deal with as you will? There
are responsibilities of Empire as well as pride in it, and pride of
Empire is apt to founder when the responsibilities of Empire are
ignored. And so the Theosophist is content to go to the root of the
matter, and try to build up for you the citizens out of whom your
future State is to be made. Education, real education, secular
education, is now your cry. They tried secular education in France;
they destroyed religious teaching; they tried to give morality without
religion. But the moral lessons had no effect: they were too cold and
dull, and dead. Is it not a scandal that in a country like this, where
the vast majority are religious, you are quarrelling so much about the
trifles that separate you, that the only way to peace seems to be to
take religion out of the schools altogether, and train the children
only in morality, allowing an insignificant minority to have its way?
Why! we have done better than that in India, we Theosophists. Hindu
Theosophists have founded there a College in which, despite all their
sects and all their religious quarrels, they have found a common
minimum of Hinduism on which their children can be trained in
religion and morality alike. I grant it was a Theosophical inspiration
that began the movement; but the whole mass of Hindus have fallen
in with it, and are accepting the books as the basis of education.
Government has recognised them, and has begun to introduce them for
the use of Hindus in its own schools. That is the way in which we
Theosophists work at politics. We go to the root to build character,
and we know that noble characters will make a noble and also a
prosperous nation. But you can no more make a nation of free men out
of children untrained in duty and in righteousness, than you can build
a house that will stand if you use ill-baked bricks and rotten timber.
Our keynote in politics is Brotherhood. That worked out into life will
give you the nation that you want.

And what does Brotherhood mean? It means that everyone of us, you and
I, every man and woma